Teachers' Perspectives on Sexual Health Education in Ontario Catholic Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, the Ontario Ministry of Education (2015) released the new Health and Physical Education Curriculum (HPE) for grades 1-8 and 9-12 including the updated Sexual Health Education (SHE) strand. Research studies have not explicitly examined how teachers’ personal religiosity affects their moral or ethical duties to present sexual health education. My central research question was: how are Ontario Catholic grades 3-8 teachers experiencing and negotiating the implementation of the new 2015 Sexual Health Education curriculum strand through a Catholic lens? Three Catholic teachers of grades three and four, six, and eight, in Southern Ontario were interviewed about their experiences implementing the new SHE curriculum. Five themes emerged from the interviews: the teachers felt sex education was necessary in Catholic schools; they did not understand the public controversy regarding the topics covered; they did not have any formal training and support varied from school to school; the teachers used their varying levels of religiosity and Catholic perspective to handle controversial topics; and the teachers felt that compassion for students was more important than enforcing Catholic doctrine. These findings suggest that Catholic school boards and the Ontario Ministry of Education should invest in positive publicity for SHE in religious contexts. Furthermore, Catholic school boards and educators would benefit from further support understanding how Catholicism impacts SHE and its delivery. Lastly, educational researchers should investigate educators’ religiosity as a spectrum rather than a binary. Key Words:
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".